Input effects on the morphosyntactic development of Dutch as a heritage language in bilingual children

This project investigates the development of Dutch as a heritage language in German-Dutch and French-Dutch bilingual children. Many children speak a language other than the societal language at home; this language is called the heritage language or home language. Previous research has shown that heritage speakers use the heritage language in a different way than the homeland standard. For example, Dutch spoken by a French-Dutch bilingual child growing up in France might sound slightly different than Dutch spoken by a monolingual child growing up in the Netherlands. A child heritage speaker of Dutch might say “morgen, ik ga naar school” instead of “morgen ga ik naar school”. In this project, we investigate the language development of Dutch-speaking children in France and Germany over a period of four years. This way, we investigate how child heritage speakers develop their language and what factors influence this.